- Forum discussion topics
Ethical considerations around watchlists
‘Watchlists’ are a contentious issue in scholarly publishing. They are used to maintain a record of authors or journals who have behaved unethically, either for internal publisher/journal purposes or as a public reference point. Several publicly available watchlists have been removed in recent years owing to concerns around the lack of transparency in the criteria they use. Others note the lega… - Forum discussion topics
Claiming institutional affiliations
December 2023 Watch the introduction to "Claiming institutional affiliations" with Ana Marušić - Forum discussion topics
Coordinating multi-journal complaints
June 2021 When and how to involve multiple journals and publishers in dealing with complaints from whistleblowers Complaints received from whistleblowers can develop into large investigations with multiple journals, editors, and publishers involved. Such complaints may involve many articles from a single author group or multiple author… - Forum discussion topics
Ethical considerations around book publishing
March 2021 Periodically, COPE gets requests for the development of discussion documents, guidance and flowcharts on publication ethics issues related to book publishing. Many of our members publish both journals and books, and a number of these members reference COPE guidance on journal publishing and ethics as providing useful information on p… - Forum discussion topics
Systematic manipulation of the publishing process via “paper mills”
September 2020 Increasingly, across the research publishing landscape, publishers are seeing large scale manipulation of the publication process. The production of fraudulent papers at scale via alleged ‘paper mills’ is one such manipulation. Participants discussed this at the COPE Forum, September 2020. Paper mills Pape… - Forum discussion topics
COPE Forum 4 June 2013: Authorship, contributorship, who’s doing what, and what do we need?
The topic for discussion at this Forum was ‘Authorship, contributorship, who’s doing what, and what do we need?’ Authorship issues are one of the most common issues that COPE members have to deal with. Leaving aside the ethically problematic issues of ghost, guest and gift authorship, seemingly simpler authorship disputes of for example, who deserves authorship, or what author order should be…